Dead Easy for Dover

she carried out her engagements in every quarter of the globe. With a few elementary precautions, an attractive middle-aged man with a reasonably fat wallet could still find life worth living.
This side of the Brigadier’s personality had not, as it happens, escaped Dover who, having sat down heavily on the chair which had been cleared for him, had been making his own moody assessment of his host. He was just the type, Dover reckoned, to go lusting after a kid young enough to be his grand-daughter.
‘This is a bad business,’ said the Brigadier.
Dover scowled. ‘What is?’
‘Well, this murder,’ said the Brigadier, who’d only been making polite conversation and was disconcerted to find himself apparently in the dock.
‘You speak for yourself!’ growled Dover with an unpleasant sniff. ‘Murder may be a bad business to you, but it happens to be my bread and butter.’
‘Oh, quite,’ said the Brigadier hurriedly. ‘Quite. I – er – I hadn’t looked at the tragedy in quite that light before.’ He turned, as so many did after their initial encounter with Dover, to Sergeant MacGregor for relief and comfort. Apart from anything else, the younger man was, of course, so much pleasanter to look at.
MacGregor obligingly produced a nice, innocuous question. ‘Do you and Mrs Gough live here alone?’
‘Yes, we do.’
‘No servants?’
‘None living in. There’s a char-lady who comes in a couple of mornings a week.’
‘And no children?’
The Brigadier sighed and shook his head sadly. ‘I’m afraid not.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Things might have been different if we had, I suppose. I mean, whatever else you say about children, they do tend to keep a woman occupied, don’t they? Fill up the day for her. Give her something to think about.’
‘I suppose so,’ agreed MacGregor, assuming that these somewhat generalised remarks had particular application to Mrs Esmond Gough.
The Brigadier sighed again. ‘Ah, well,’ he said, ‘it was not to be. My fault, too,’ he added despondently. ‘Some damn-fool bug I got into the old system out in Korea – or so the medics tell me. Rotten thing for a chap to have to admit to, but I don’t care to have people going around putting the blame on my lady wife.’
Dover got bored with all this gruff, soldierly talk. ‘Where were you when it happened?’ he demanded, injecting a real edge of malice into the question.
The Brigadier failed to fall into so obvious a trap. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know when the murder was committed,’ he said with every show of innocence.
Dover’s scowl grew blacker. If there was one thing he couldn’t stand it was people trying to be clever with him. He was just about to get really nasty when the door opened and Mrs Esmond Gough made her entrance.
She hadn’t, as it happens, been on the telephone to Sweden or anywhere else. That was just a pious fiction. What she had been doing in the intervening moments was working away in front of the mirror, achieving her usual expert job on her face. Some of her more besotted followers might attribute that flawless skin, those sparkling eyes and that well-moulded figure to holiness and clean living, but Mrs Esmond Gough knew that it took a good deal more than that.
She swept into the room in a swirl of diaphanous purple – a colour which suited Mrs Esmond Gough’s rather regal personality, and the prelatical connotations of which had probably not escaped her notice. In the last few years, when her campaign for women priests had really taken off and she had started making appearances on colour telly almost every week, she had begun to dress almost exclusively in purple. It had become her trade mark.
‘Oh, please,’ she said in that wonderfully musical voice of hers, ‘do please sit down!’
The two gentlemen who had risen to their feet at her entry duly complied with the request, while Detective Chief Inspector Dover remained slumped in his chair like a sack of potatoes. He was busy trying to get his tongue round a piece of Miss Henty-Harris’s buttered scone which was lurking somewhere behind his upper set. It was no good, though. In the end he was obliged to take his teeth right out and remove the offending crumb with his finger.
Mrs Esmond Gough didn’t bat an eyelid. She was not the woman to be put out by a gratuitous display of male rudeness. After all, she’d been engaged for a number of years in storming one of the last masculine bastions – and clerks in holy orders can play it remarkably rough when they put their minds to it. She seated herself with deliberate grace in a chair which only the really petty-minded would have found at all like a bishop’s throne. ‘We won’t offer you any coffee,’ she announced with a winning smile, ‘as I’m sure Miss Henty-Harris has already given you some. My husband’ – the word was pronounced with a special affection – ‘saw you coming out of her drive.’
The Brigadier made the formal introductions. ‘They want to know what we were doing at the time of the murder, m’dear.’
‘That would probably be about ten days ago,’ explained MacGregor in an attempt to save time. ‘A week last Wednesday, to be precise.’
Mrs Esmond Gough glanced enquiringly at her husband. ‘Good heavens,’ she murmured, ‘we shall have to think about that. It’s not easy to remember off hand. Perhaps if you were to get my engagements book, dear . . .’
‘It’s the night Sir Perceval Henty-Harris died, I believe,’ said MacGregor.
Mrs Esmond Gough’s face cleared. ‘Ah, that helps!’
The Brigadier blinked. ‘Does it, m’dear?’
‘Is it the evening you are interested in, sergeant, or earlier in the day?’
‘We would like to know about the evening,’ said MacGregor.
‘Say from about six o’clock.’
‘Wednesday was the twelfth, wasn’t it?’ Mrs Gough had got the problem well under control – and it showed. ‘Well, I think my husband and I can provide ourselves with a perfectly satisfactory alibi, if that is in effect what you are looking for. Now,